Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)

I wish the author had spelled out the subtextual implications for peak oil demand and the energy costs of solar. I will try to give my perspective I suppose.

We always thought that once solar achieved cost Parity with gas generation, it would be a cascade effect of rapid solarization due to the cost basis alone, finally shedding the necessity of ethical ideology to promote it.

That happened roughly in 2015 for the US, and nothing substantial changed. Then the costs of solar got cut in half. And now as we breach the mythical $1/watt barrier for utility scale solar installation, we still find ourselves breaking oil production records year after year.

We're so far past the "kerosene moment" and barely seeing exponential growth on solar capacity install. Meanwhile China is adding more than 4x as much.

I think the moral of the kerosene story and solar is that it's hard to flip a paradigm that is currently enabling people to get rich. The only time it seems to change is when a law is passed.

Anyone who has read Moby Dick knows that this passage:

> And since whaling technology had come along so much since the 19th century - with powerful diesel engined vessels equipped with ever more lethal harpoons and even onboard processing plants, allowing sailors to drain the spermaceti out of their catches at sea rather than having to bring them back to land - sperm whale populations were ravaged long, long after the discovery of kerosene.

contains a distinct factual error. The whalers were processing their catch at sea even in the 1800s. Probably not as efficiently, but still they were not dragging their catch back to land for processing.

The Soviet union had an outsized role in this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_an...

To meet lucrative production quotas, the Soviet Union lied to international agencies about how many whales they were catching. While they didn't harvest the most amount of whales in the 20th century, they disregarded treaties that protected endangered whales and breeding populations.

https://www.i-deel.org/blog/mass-killing-for-no-reason-the-p...

The worst part is there was little to no actual demand for whaling products in the Soviet Union, so most of they collected was treated as a waste product or simply dumped.

There's a similar idea about energy transitions: ostensibly human kind has transitioned from wood to coal to petrol to nuclear etc. Given time we'll have transitioned to renewables for all our energy needs...

In fact what happened is those energy sources kept being piled on top of one another. Today we consume more wood coal and fossils than ever before. [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

The graph kinda does show that kerosene saved the sperm whale doesn't it? Whaling went down for like 60 years before spiking once cars became a thing. I imagine electric lighting also helped out.

NYT 1975: Transmission Problems in Cars Linked to Ban on Whale Killing

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...

I was at a meeting and was sitting next to a guy whose company made an on-premise clone of parts of AWS. By the end of that conversation I came to find out that a lot of their funding came from Amazon.

A lot of people will walk into a trap. Some, once in it, will thrash to get out of it. Even if they hurt themselves in the process, they gain their freedom. Other people, seeing an escape route, will happily or at least grudgingly stay a while longer. Which then doesn’t warn off observers from making the same mistake.

If it makes sense for AWS to fund a “competitor”, then it makes sense for whale oil lamp sellers to cheer for an alternative fuel because the users can think, “we can always switch to kerosene”. And I’ve seen too many people who want to try something at least once while they still have the chance to experience it.

The title and much of the article suggests that sperm whale might be extinct today.

While their population is down from estimates before whaling in the nineteen century; current estimates are about half a million of them are swimming around the globe today.

Kerosene did save the sperm whale.

And the author missed the reason:

> As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives.

Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price sensitive use of spermaceti oil.

If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict the supply.

Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really know or care about spermaceti oil.

Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps. There are only a few places that make naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that is a high value use case.

A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things that affected the common people.

The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive, widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact any type of supply restriction on it.

And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding alternatives.

What are other counterintuitive stories like this? (Regardless of veracity)

* Kerosene saves the whales

* Plastics saves the elephants

* Coal saved the forests

Other similar stories?

The book ("Material World") is fantastic, I hope he'll make another tome on some other resources :)

Obligatory comment: Moby Dick is a work of stunning glory and if you think you can abridge it you are missing the entire point.

For the same reason solar panels aren't going to stop people from drilling and sucking up every last drop of oil.